Sant'Agostino: The Madonna with the Dirty Feet
Why is it significant?
Climb the wide steps, push open the door and turn to the first chapel on your left. Above the altar, a young mother with a big, heavy child in her arms leans in a doorway, and two kneeling pilgrims gaze up at her. Before anything else, look down... at the man's feet.
Key Facts
| Place | Sant'Agostino: The Madonna with the Dirty Feet |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza di Sant'Agostino 80, 00186 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.90090, 12.47430 |
| Part of Walk | Caravaggio's Rome: Masterpieces, Brawls and a Killing |
| Generated | Generated |
Climb the wide steps, push open the door and turn to the first chapel on your left. Above the altar, a young mother with a big, heavy child in her arms leans in a doorway, and two kneeling pilgrims gaze up at her. Before anything else, look down... at the man's feet.
This is the Madonna di Loreto, also called the Madonna of the Pilgrims, painted around 1604 to 1606 for the Cavalletti family chapel. At Loreto, on the Adriatic coast, pilgrims venerated the Holy House of Nazareth, believed to have been carried there by angels. Caravaggio turns the miracle into a scene on a Roman doorstep. The Virgin's doorway is a crumbling wall with peeling plaster, and she has no throne, no clouds, no angels, only one bare foot crossed over the other.
And then the pilgrims: an old woman in a dirty bonnet, and a man whose bare feet, black soles and all, are thrust straight out at the viewer, at about the height of your face if you kneel at the altar rail. His rival Baglione wrote that the common people made an enormous fuss about it. Some loved it, because here at last were people like them. Others thought it an insult to the Mother of God.
The model for the Virgin is generally believed to be Lena, Maddalena Antognetti, the woman over whom he attacked the notary. A woman from the streets around Piazza Navona, posing as the Madonna, over the altar of a church in the heart of papal Rome. Everybody in the neighbourhood would have recognised her.
Before you leave, look for Raphael's fresco of the prophet Isaiah on a pillar of the nave, and Jacopo Sansovino's marble Madonna del Parto near the entrance, her foot worn smooth by generations of hopeful mothers-to-be. Three very different ideas of holiness under one roof. Then walk west, toward the river, to Via di Tor di Nona and the site of a prison Caravaggio knew far too well.